Visiting his fi ancée’s Missouri home-stead in 1894, Theod.docx

V
isiting his fi ancée’s Missouri home-
stead in 1894, Theodore Dreiser
was struck by “the spirit of rural
America, its idealism, its dreams.” But this
was an “American tradition in which I,
alas, could not share,” Dreiser wrote. “I
had seen Pittsburgh. I had seen Lithua-
nians and Hungarians in their [alleys] and
hovels. I had seen the girls of the
city — walking the streets at night.” Only
twenty-three years old at the time, Dreiser
would go on to write one of the great
American urban novels, Sister Carrie
(1900), about one young woman in the
army of small-town Americans fl ocking to
the Big City. But Dreiser, part of that army,
already knew that between rural America
and Pittsburgh, an unbridgeable chasm
had opened up.
In 1820, after two hundred years of settlement, the vast majority
of Americans
lived in rural areas. After that, decade by decade, the urban
population swelled until,
by 1900, one of every fi ve Americans was a city dweller.
Nearly 6.5 million people in-
habited just three great cities: New York, Chicago, and
Philadelphia (Table 18.1).
The city was where the factories went up and where the new

immigrants settled,
constituting one-third of all big-city residents in 1900. Here,
too, lived the million-
aires, and a growing white-collar class. For all these people, the
city was more than a
place to make a living. It provided the setting for an urban
culture unlike anything
seen before in the United States. City people, although differing
vastly among them-
selves, became distinctively and recognizably urban.
These vast aggregations
of humanity, where he
who seeks isolation may
find it more truly than
in a desert; where wealth
and poverty touch and
jostle; where one revels
and another starves
within a few feet of each
other — they are the
centers and types of our
civilization.
— Henry George, 1883

The Industrial
City: Building It,
Living in It18
C H A P T E R
523
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524 � PA R T F O U R A Maturing Industrial Society,
1877–1914
Urbanization
“The greater part of our population must live in cities,” declared
the Congregational
minister Josiah Strong. And from another writer, “There was no
resisting the trend.”
Why this sense of inevitability? Because of another inevitability
of American life:
industrialism.
Until the Civil War, cities were the places where goods were
bought and sold for

distribution into the interior or out to world markets. Early
industry, by contrast,
sprang up mostly in the countryside, where factories had access
to water power, nearby
fuel and raw materials, and workers recruited from farms and
villages.
As industrialization proceeded, city and factory began to merge.
Once steam en-
gines came along, mill operators no longer depended on water-
driven power. Rail-
roads enabled factory builders to locate at the places best
situated in relation to sup-
pliers and markets. Iron makers gravitated to Pittsburgh because
of its superior access
to coal and ore fi elds. Chicago, midway between western
livestock suppliers and east-
ern markets, became a great meatpacking center. Geographic
concentration of indus-
try meant urban growth. So did the rising scale of production. A
plant that employed
thousands of workers instantly created a small city in its
vicinity, sometimes in the
form of a company town like Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, which
became, body and soul,
the property of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. Other fi
rms built big plants at
the edges of large cities, close to an ample labor force and
transportation facilities.
The boundaries between industrial towns sometimes blurred,
and, as in northern
New Jersey or along Lake Michigan south of Chicago, extended
urban-industrial
areas emerged.
Older commercial cities meanwhile industrialized. Warehouse

districts could
readily be converted to small-scale manufacturing; a
distribution network was right at
hand. In addition, as gateways for immigrants, port cities
offered abundant cheap la-
bor. Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and San Francisco became
hives of small-scale,
TABLE 18.1 Ten Largest Cities by Population, 1870 and
1900
1870 1900
City Population City Population
1. New York 942,292 New York 3,437,202
2. Philadelphia 674,022 Chicago 1,698,575
3. Brooklyn* 419,921 Philadelphia 1,293,697
4. St. Louis 310,864 St. Louis 575,238
5. Chicago 298,977 Boston 560,892
6. Baltimore 267,354 Baltimore 508,957
7. Boston 250,526 Cleveland 381,768
8. Cincinnati 216,239 Buff alo 352,387
9. New Orleans 191,418 San Francisco 342,782
10. San Francisco 149,473 Cincinnati 325,902
*Brooklyn was consolidated with New York in 1898.
SOURCE: U.S. Census data.
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C H A P T E R 1 8 The Industrial City: Building It, Living in
It � 525
labor-intensive industry. New York, with its enormous pool of
immigrant workers,
became a magnet for the garment trades, cigar making, and
diversifi ed light industry.
Preeminent as a city of trade and fi nance, New York also
ranked as the nation’s largest
manufacturing center.
City Innovation
As cities expanded, so did their growing problems. How would
so many people move
around, communicate, and have their physical needs met? No
less than industry, the
city demanded innovation and, in the end, compiled just as
impressive a record of
technological achievement.
The older commercial cities had been compact, densely settled
around harbors or
riverfronts. As late as 1850, when it had 565,000 people,
Philadelphia covered only ten
square miles. From the foot of Chestnut Street on the Delaware
River, a person could
walk almost anywhere in the city within forty-fi ve minutes.

Thereafter, as it developed,
Philadelphia spilled out and, like American cities everywhere,
engulfed the surround-
ing countryside.
“The only trouble about this town,” wrote Mark Twain on
arriving in New York in
1867, “is that it is too large. You cannot accomplish anything in
the way of business,
you cannot even pay a friendly call without devoting a whole
day to it. . . . [The]
distances are too great.” Moving nearly a million New Yorkers
around was not as hope-
less as Twain thought, but it did challenge the ingenuity of city
builders.
The fi rst innovation, dating back to the 1820s, was the
omnibus, an elongated
version of the horse-drawn carriage. Putting the car on iron
tracks then enabled the
horses to pull more passengers at a faster clip through crowded
city streets. The pro-
truding rails, the chief objection to the horsecar, were overcome
by a modest but
crucial refi nement in 1852: a grooved rail that was fl ush with
the pavement. Next
came the electric trolley car, the brainchild primarily of Frank
J. Sprague, an engi-
neer once employed by the great inventor Thomas A. Edison. In
1887, Sprague de-
signed an electricity-driven system for Richmond, Virginia: A
“trolley” carriage run-
ning along an overhead power line was attached by cable to
streetcars equipped with
an electric motor — hence the name “trolley car.” After
Sprague’s success, the trolley

swiftly displaced the horsecar.
In America’s great metropolises, however, the streetcar itself
was no solution. Con-
gestion led to demands that transit lines be moved off the
streets. In 1879, the fi rst ele-
vated railroads went into operation on Sixth and Ninth Avenues
in New York City. Pow-
ered at fi rst by steam engines, the “els” were converted to
electricity following Sprague’s
success with the trolley. Chicago developed elevated transit
most fully. Other cities looked
below ground. Boston opened a short underground line in 1897,
but it was the comple-
tion in 1904 of a subway running the length of Manhattan that
demonstrated the full
potential of the high-speed underground train. Mass transit had
become rapid transit.
Equally remarkable was the architectural revolution sweeping
metropolitan centers.
With steel girders, durable plate glass, and the passenger
elevator available by the 1880s,
a wholly new way of construction opened up. A steel skeleton
supported the building,
while the walls, previously weight bearing, served as curtains
enclosing the structure.
The sky, so to speak, became the limit.
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1877–1914
The fi rst “skyscraper” to be built on this principle was William
Le Baron Jenney’s
ten-story Home Insurance Building (1885) in Chicago. Although
unremarkable in
appearance — it looked just like the other downtown buildings
— Jenney’s steel-girdered
structure liberated American architecture. A Chicago school
arose, dedicated to the de-
sign of buildings whose form expressed, rather than masked,
their structure and func-
tion. The presiding genius was the architect Louis Sullivan, who
developed a “vertical
aesthetic” of set-back windows and strong columns that gave
skyscrapers a “proud and
soaring” presence. Chicago pioneered skyscraper construction,
but New York, with its
unrelenting demand for prime downtown space, took the lead
after the mid-1890s. The
fi fty-fi ve-story Woolworth Building, completed in 1913,
marked the beginning of the
modern Manhattan skyline.
For ordinary citizens, the electric light was the best evidence
that times had
changed. Gaslight — illuminated gas produced from coal — had
been in use since the

early nineteenth century, but at 12 candlepower, the lamps were
too dim to brighten
the city’s downtown streets and public spaces. The fi rst use of
electricity, once generat-
ing technology made it commercially feasible in the 1870s, was
for better city lighting.
Charles F. Brush’s electric arc lamps, installed in Wanamaker’s
department store in
Philadelphia in 1878, threw a brilliant light and soon replaced
gaslight on city streets.
The Chicago Elevated, 1900
This is Wabash Avenue, looking north from Adams Street. For
Americans from farms and small towns,
this photograph by William Henry Jackson captured something
of the peculiarity of the urban scene.
What could be stranger than a railroad suspended above the
streets in the midst of people’s lives? KEA
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It � 527
Electric lighting then entered the American home, thanks to
Thomas Edison’s inven-
tion of a serviceable incandescent bulb in 1879. Edison’s motto
— “Let there be
light!” — truly described modern city life.
Before it had any signifi cant effect on industry, electricity gave
the city its quickening
tempo, lifting elevators, powering streetcars and subway trains,
turning night into day.
Meanwhile, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone (1876) sped
communication beyond any-
thing imagined previously. Twain’s complaint of 1867, that it
was impossible to carry on
business in New York, had been answered: All he needed to do
was pick up the phone.
Private City, Public City
City building was mostly an exercise in private enterprise. The
profi t motive spurred
the great innovations — the trolley car, electric lighting, the
skyscraper, the elevator,
the telephone — and drove urban real estate development. The
investment opportuni-
ties looked so tempting that new cities sprang up almost
overnight from the ruins of
the Chicago fi re of 1871 and the San Francisco earthquake of
1906. Real estate inter-
ests, eager to develop subdivisions, lobbied for streetcar lines
pushing outward from
the central districts. The subway, predicted the New York
Times, would open the outer
suburbs to “a population of ten millions . . . housed
comfortably, healthfully and

relatively cheaply” — a gold mine for developers.
America gave birth to what one urban historian has called the
“private city,”
shaped primarily by many individuals, all pursuing their own
goals and bent on mak-
ing money. The prevailing belief was that the sum of such
private activity would far
exceed what the community might accomplish through public
effort.
Yet constitutionally, it was up to municipal governments to
draw the line between
public and private. New York City was legally entitled to
operate a municipally owned
subway, the State Supreme Court ruled in 1897. Even private
property was subject to
whatever regulations the city might impose. Moreover, city
governance improved impres-
sively in the late nineteenth century. Though by no means
corruption-free, municipal
agencies became more professionalized and more expansive in
the functions they under-
took. Nowhere in the world were there bigger public projects:
aqueducts, sewage systems,
bridges, and spacious parks.
In the space between public and private, however, was an
environmental no-man’s
land. City streets were often fi lthy and poorly maintained.
“Three or four days of warm
spring weather,” remarked a New York journalist, would turn
Manhattan’s garbage-
strewn, snow-clogged streets into “veritable mud rivers.” Air
quality likewise suffered.
A visitor to Pittsburgh noted “the heavy pall of smoke which

constantly overhangs
her . . . until the very sun looks coppery through the sooty
haze.” As for the lovely
hills rising from the rivers, “They have been leveled down, cut
into, sliced off, and ruth-
lessly marred and mutilated.”
In earlier times, the urban poor had lived mainly in makeshift
wooden structures
in alleys and back streets and then, as more prosperous families
moved away, in the
subdivided homes left behind. As land values climbed after the
Civil War, speculators
began to erect buildings specifi cally designed for the urban
masses. In New York City,
the dreadful result was fi ve- or six-story tenements, structures
housing twenty or more
families in cramped, airless apartments.
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1877–1914

Reformers recognized the problem but seemed unable to solve
it. Some favored
model tenements fi nanced by public-spirited citizens. But
private philanthropy was
no answer to escalating land values in downtown areas. The
landlords of the poor ex-
pected a return on their investment, and that meant high-
density, cheaply built hous-
ing. This economic fact defi ed nineteenth-century solutions.
It was not that America lacked an urban vision. On the contrary,
an abiding rural
ideal exerted a powerful infl uence on city planners. Frederick
Law Olmsted, who de-
signed New York City’s Central Park, wanted cities that
exposed people to the beauties
of nature. One of Olmsted’s projects, the Chicago Columbian
Exposition of 1893, gave
rise to the “City Beautiful” movement, which fostered larger
park systems, broad bou-
levards and parkways, and, after the turn of the century, zoning
laws and planned
suburbs.
But usually it was too little and too late. “Fifteen or twenty
years ago a plan might
have been adopted that would have made this one of the most
beautiful cities in the
world,” Kansas City’s park commissioners reported in 1893. At
that time, however,
“such a policy could not be fully appreciated.” Nor, even if
Kansas City had foreseen its
future, would it have shouldered the “heavy burden” of trying to
shape its develop-
ment. The American city had placed its faith in the dynamics of
the marketplace, not

the restraints of a planned future. The pluses and minuses are
perhaps best revealed by
the following comparison.
Chicago, Illinois, and Berlin, Germany, had virtually equal
populations in 1900.
But they had very different histories. Seventy years earlier,
when Chicago had been a
muddy frontier outpost, Berlin was already a city of 250,000
and the royal seat of the
Hohenzollerns of Prussia.
With German unifi cation in 1871, the imperial authorities
rebuilt Berlin on a
grander scale. “A capital city is essential for the state, to act as
a pivot for its culture,”
proclaimed the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke.
Berlin served that na-
tional purpose — “a center where Germany’s political,
intellectual, and material life is
concentrated, and its people can feel united.” Chicago had no
such pretensions. It was
strictly a place of business, made great by virtue of its strategic
grip on the commerce
of America’s heartland. Nothing in Chicago approached the
grandeur of Berlin’s
monumental palaces and public buildings, nor were Chicagoans
witness to the pomp
and ceremony of the imperial parades up Berlin’s Unter den
Linden to the national
cathedral.
Yet as a functioning city, Chicago was in many ways superior to
Berlin. Chicago’s
waterworks pumped 500 million gallons of water a day, or 139
gallons of water per

person, while Berliners had to make do with 18 gallons. Flush
toilets, a rarity in Berlin
in 1900, could be found in 60 percent of Chicago’s homes.
Chicago’s streets were lit by
electricity, while Berlin still relied mostly on gaslight. Chicago
had a much bigger
streetcar system, more spacious parks, and a public library that
contained many more
volumes. And Chicago had just completed an amazing sanitation
project that reversed
the course of the Chicago River so that its waters — and the
city’s sewage — would fl ow
away from Lake Michigan.
Giant sanitation projects were one thing; an inspiring urban
environment was
something else. For well-traveled Americans admiring of things
European, the sense
of inferiority was palpable. “We are enormously rich,” admitted
the journalist Edwin
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It � 529
L. Godkin, “but . . . what have we got to show?
Almost nothing. Ugliness from an artistic point
of view is the mark of all our cities.” Thus, the
urban balance sheet: a utilitarian infrastructure
that was superb by nineteenth-century standards
but “no municipal splendors of any description,
nothing but population and hotels.”
Upper Class/Middle Class
In the early republic, class distinctions had been
embedded in the way men and women dressed
and demonstrated by the deference they demanded
from or granted others. As the industrial city
grew, these marks of class weakened. In the
anonymity of a big city, recognition and deference
no longer served as mechanisms for conferring status. Instead,
people began to rely on
conspicuous display of wealth, membership in exclusive clubs,
and, above all, residence
in exclusive neighborhoods.
The Urban Elite
As early as the 1840s, Boston merchants had taken advantage of
the new railway ser-
vice to escape the congested city. Fine rural estates appeared in
Milton, Newton, and
other outlying towns. By 1848, roughly 20 percent of Boston’s
businessmen were mak-
ing the trip downtown by train. Ferries that plied the harbor
between Manhattan and
Brooklyn served the same purpose for well-to-do New Yorkers.
As commercial development engulfed the downtown, the exodus
by the elite

quickened. In Cincinnati, wealthy families settled on the scenic
hills rimming the
crowded, humid tableland that ran down to the Ohio River. On
those hillsides, a trav-
eler noted in 1883, “The homes of Cincinnati’s merchant
princes and millionaires are
found . . . elegant cottages, tasteful villas, and substantial
mansions, surrounded by
a paradise of grass, gardens, lawns, and tree-shaded roads.”
Residents of the area, called
Hilltop, founded country clubs, downtown gentlemen’s clubs,
and a round of social
activities for the pleasure of Cincinnati’s elite.
Despite the attractions of country life, many of the very richest
people preferred
the heart of the city. Chicago boasted its Gold Coast; San
Francisco, Nob Hill; and
Denver, Quality Hill. New York novelist Edith Wharton recalled
how the comfortable
midcentury brownstones gave way to the “ ‘new’ millionaire
houses,” which spread
northward on Fifth Avenue along Central Park. Great mansions,
emulating the aristo-
cratic houses of Europe, lined Fifth Avenue at the turn of the
century.
But great wealth did not automatically confer social standing.
An established elite
dominated the social heights, even in such relatively raw cities
as San Francisco and
Denver. It had taken only a generation — sometimes less — for
money made in com-
merce or real estate to shed its tarnish and become “old” and
genteel. In long-settled

� Why can we say that techno-
logical innovation was just as
signifi cant in building Ameri-
can cities as it was in driving
American industrialization?
� Why was the American city not
capable of doing a better job
of protecting the environment
and providing adequate hous-
ing for the poor?
� If we count the degraded en-
vironment and poor housing
as failures, why does Chicago
come off so well in comparison
to Berlin?
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1877–1914

Boston, wealth passed intact through several generations,
creating a closely knit tribe
of “Brahmin” families that kept moneyed newcomers at bay.
Elsewhere, urban elites
tended to be more open, but only to the socially ambitious who
were prepared to make
visible and energetic use of their money.
In Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Titan (1914), the tycoon Frank
Cowperwood
reassures his unhappy wife that if Chicago society will not
accept them, “there are
other cities. Money will arrange matters in New York — that I
know. We can build a
real place there, and go in on equal terms, if we have money
enough.” New York thus
came to be a magnet for millionaires. The city attracted them
not only as the nation’s
preeminent fi nancial center but also for the opportunities it
offered for display and
social recognition.
This infusion of wealth shattered New York’s older social elite.
Seeking to be as-
similated into the upper class, the fl ood of moneyed newcomers
simply overwhelmed
it. There followed a curious process of reconstruction, a
deliberate effort to defi ne the
rules of conduct and identify those who properly “belonged” in
New York society.
The key fi gure was Ward McAllister, a southern-born lawyer
who had made a quick
fortune in gold-rush San Francisco and then taken up a second
career as the arbiter of
New York society. In 1888, McAllister compiled the fi rst

Social Register, “comprising an
accurate and careful list” of all those deemed eligible for New
York society. McAllister
instructed the socially ambitious on how to select guests, set a
proper table, arrange a
party, and launch a young lady into society. He presided over a
round of assemblies,
balls, and dinners that defi ned the boundaries of an elite
society. At the apex stood “The
Four Hundred” — the cream of New York society. McAllister’s
list corresponded to
those invited to Mrs. William Astor’s gala ball of February 1,
1892.
From Manhattan, an extravagant life radiated out to such
favored resorts as Saratoga
Springs, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida. In Rhode Island,
Newport featured a
grand array of summer “cottages,” crowned by the Vanderbilts’
Marble House and The
Breakers. Visitors arrived via private railway car or aboard
yachts and amused them-
selves at the races and gambling casinos. In New York City, the
rich dined extravagantly
at Delmonico’s, on one famous occasion while mounted on
horseback. The underside
to this excess — scandalous affairs, rowdy feasts that ended in
police court, the notori-
ously opulent costume ball thrown at the Waldorf-Astoria by the
Bradley Martins at the
peak of economic depression in 1897 — was avidly followed in
the press and awarded
the celebrity we now accord to rock musicians and Hollywood
stars.
Americans were adept at making money, complained the

journalist Edwin
L. Godkin in 1896, but they lacked the European aristocratic
traditions for spending
it: “Great wealth has not yet entered our manners.” In their
struggle to fi nd the way,
the moneyed elite made an indelible mark on urban life. If there
was magnifi cence in
the American city, that was mainly their handiwork. And if
there was conspicuous
waste and display, that too was their doing.
The Suburban World
The middle class left a smaller imprint on the city. Many of its
members, unlike the
rich, preferred privacy, retreating into a suburban world that
insulated them from the
hurly-burly of urban life.
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It � 531
Since colonial times, self-employed lawyers, doctors,

merchants, and proprietors
had been the backbone of a robust American middle class.
While independent careers
remained important, industrialism spawned a new middle class
of salaried employees.
Corporate organizations required managers, accountants, and
clerks. Industrial tech-
nology called for engineers, chemists, and designers, while the
distribution system
needed salesmen, advertising executives, and store managers.
These salaried ranks in-
creased sevenfold between 1870 and 1910 — much faster than
any other occupational
group. Nearly nine million people held white-collar jobs in
1910, more than one-
fourth of all employed Americans.
Some members of this white-collar class lived in the row houses
of Baltimore and
Boston or the comfortable apartment buildings of New York
City. More preferred to
escape the clamor and congestion of the city. They were
attracted by a persisting rural
ideal, agreeing with the landscape architect Andrew Jackson
Downing that “nature and
domestic life are better than the society and manners of town.”
As trolley service
pushed out from the city center, middle-class Americans
followed the wealthy into the
countryside. All sought what one Chicago developer promised
for his North Shore
subdivision in 1875: “qualities of which the city is in a large
degree bereft, namely, its
pure air, peacefulness, quietude, and natural scenery.”
The geography of the suburbs was truly a map of class

structure; where a family
lived told where it ranked socially. As one proceeded out from
the city center, the
houses became fi ner, the lots larger, the inhabitants wealthier.
Affl uent businessmen
and professionals had the time for a long commute into town.
Closer in, lower-income
households generally had more than one wage earner, less
secure employment, and
jobs requiring movement around the city. It was better for them
to be closer to the city
center because cross-town transportation lines afforded the
commuting fl exibility
they needed.
Suburban boundaries shifted constantly as working-class city
residents who
wanted better lives moved to the cheapest suburbs, prompting
an exodus of older
residents, who in turn pushed the next higher group farther out
in search of space and
greenery. Suburbanization was the sum of countless individual
decisions. Each fami-
ly’s move represented an advance in living standards — not
only more light, air, and
quiet but also better accommodation than the city afforded.
Suburban houses were
typically larger for the same money and equipped with fl ush
toilets, hot water, central
heating, and, by the turn of the century, electricity.
The suburbs also restored an opportunity that city-bound
Americans thought they
had lost. In the suburbs, home ownership again became the
norm. “A man is not really
a true man until he owns his own home,” propounded the

Reverend Russell H. Conwell
in “Acres of Diamonds,” his famous sermon on the virtues of
moneymaking.
Rural America had fostered community life. Not so the suburbs.
The grid street
pattern, while effi cient for laying out lots, offered no natural
focus for community; nor
did the shops and services that lay scattered along the trolley-
car streets. Suburban
development conformed to the economics of real estate and
transportation, and so
did the thinking of middle-class home seekers entering the
suburbs. They wanted a
house that gave them good value and convenience to the trolley
line.
The need for community had lost some of its force for middle-
class Americans.
Two other attachments assumed greater importance: work and
family.
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1877–1914
Middle-Class Families
In the pre-industrial economy, work and family life were
intertwined. Farmers, mer-
chants, and artisans generally worked at home. The household
encompassed not just
blood relatives, but everyone living and working there. As
industrialism progressed,
family life and economic activity parted company. The father
departed every morning
for the offi ce, and children spent more years in school.
Clothing was bought ready-
made; increasingly, food came in cans and packages. Middle-
class families became
smaller, excluding all but nuclear members, and consisting
typically by 1900 of hus-
band, wife, and three children.
Within this family circle, relationships became intense and
affectionate. “Home
was the most expressive experience in life,” recalled the literary
critic Henry Seidel
Canby of his growing up in the 1890s. “Though the family
might quarrel and nag, the
home held them all, protecting them against the outside world.”
For such middle-class
families, the quiet, tree-lined streets created a domestic space
insulated from the harsh-
ness of commerce and enterprise.
The burdens of domesticity fell on the wife. It was nearly
unheard of for her to seek
an outside career — that was her husband’s role. Her job was to
manage the household.

“The woman who could not make a home, like the man who
could not support one,
Middle-Class Domesticity
For middle-class Americans, the home was a place of nurture, a
refuge from the world of competitive
commerce. Perhaps that explains why their residences were so
heavily draped and cluttered with
bric-a-brac. All of it emphasized privacy and pride of
possession. Culver Pictures.
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was condemned,” Canby remembered. As the physical burdens
of household work
eased, higher-quality homemaking became the new ideal — a
message propagated by
Catherine Beecher’s best-selling book The American Woman’s
Home (1869) and by such
magazines as the Ladies’ Home Journal and Good

Housekeeping, which fi rst appeared
during the 1880s. This advice literature instructed wives that, in
addition to their do-
mestic duties, they had the responsibility for bringing
sensibility, beauty, and love to the
household. “We owe to women the charm and beauty of life,”
wrote one educator. “For
the love that rests, strengthens and inspires, we look to women.”
Womanly virtue, even if much glorifi ed, by no means put wives
on equal terms
with their husbands. Although the legal status of married
women — their right to own
property, control separate earnings, make contracts, and get a
divorce — improved
markedly during the nineteenth century, law and custom still
dictated that a wife be
submissive to her husband. She relied on his ability as the
breadwinner, and despite
her superior virtues and graces, she was thought to be below
him in vigor and intellect.
Her mind could be employed “but little and in trivial matters,”
wrote one prominent
physician, and her proper place was as “the companion or
ornamental appendage to
man.” Middle-class women faced a painful family dilemma.
They wanted fewer chil-
dren but, other than abstinence, were often at a loss about what
to do about it. Con-
traceptive devices, although heavily marketed, were either
unreliable or, as in the case
of condoms, stigmatized by association with prostitution. Many
doctors disapproved
of contraception, fearing that uncoupling sex from procreation
would release the sex-
ual appetites of men, to the detriment of their health.

On top of that, advocates of birth control had to contend with
Anthony
Comstock, secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.
In that capacity, he
campaigned relentlessly to uplift the nation’s morals. The
vehicle that he chose was a
federal law passed at his behest in 1873 prohibiting the sending
of obscene materials
through the U.S. mails. Comstock’s defi nition of obscenity
included any information
about birth control or, for that matter, any open discussion of
sex. So powerful was
Comstock’s infl uence that the suppression of vice became a
national obsession during
the 1870s.
It is this offi cial writing that has given us the notion of a
Victorian age of sexual
repression. Letters and diaries suggest that in the privacy of
their homes, husbands and
wives acted otherwise. Yet they must have done so in constant
fear of unwanted preg-
nancies. A fulfi lling sexual relationship was not easily squared
with birth control.
Not surprisingly, many bright, independent-minded women
rebelled against
marriage. More than 10 percent of women of marriageable age
remained single, and
the rate was much higher among college graduates and
professionals. Only half the
Mount Holyoke College class of 1902 married. “I know that
something perhaps, hu-
manly speaking, supremely precious has passed me by,”
remarked the writer Vida

Scudder. “But how much it would have excluded!” Married life
“looks to me often as I
watch it terribly impoverished, for women.”
If fewer women married, so, of course, did fewer men. We can,
thanks to the census,
trace the tardy progression into marriage of the male cohort
born just after the Civil
War: In 1890, when they were in their early thirties, two-fi fths
were unmarried; a de-
cade later, in their early forties, a quarter still had not married;
ultimately, a hard-core,
over 10 percent, never married. One historian has labeled the
late nineteenth century
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1877–1914
the Age of the Bachelor, a time when being an unattached male
lost its social stigma. A
bachelor’s counterpart to Vida Scudder’s dim view of marriage

was this ditty that
made the rounds in the early 1880s:
No wife to scold me
No children to squall
God bless the happy man
Who keeps bachelor’s hall.
With its residential hotels, restaurants, and abundant personal
services, the urban
scene afforded bachelors all the comforts of home and, on top
of that, a happy array of
men’s clubs, saloons, and sporting events.
The appeal of the manly life was not confi ned to confi rmed
bachelors. American
males were supposed to be independent, which meant being
one’s own boss. But the
salaried jobs they increasingly held left them distinctly not their
own bosses. Nor, once
employment was no longer centered in the household, could
they exert the patriarchal
hold over family life that had empowered their fathers and
grandfathers. A palpable
anxiety arose that the American male was becoming, as one
magazine editor warned,
“weak, effeminate, decaying.” There was a telling shift in
language. While people had
once spoken of manhood, which meant leaving childhood
behind, they now spoke of
masculinity, the opposite of femininity: Being a man meant
surmounting the feminiz-
ing infl uences of modern life.

How was this to be accomplished? By engaging in competitive
sports such as foot-
ball, which became hugely popular in this era. By working out
and becoming fi t be-
cause, as the psychologist G. Stanley Hall put it, “you can’t
have a fi rm will without fi rm
muscles.” By resorting to the great outdoors, engaging in
Theodore Roosevelt’s “strenu-
ous life.” Or vicariously, by reading books such as Owen
Wister’s best-selling cowboy
novel, The Virginian (1902). The surging popularity of westerns
and adventure novels
was surely a marker of urban dwellers’ fear that theirs was not a
life for real men.
Women perhaps had it easier. Around 1890, the glimmerings of
a sexual revolu-
tion appeared in the middle-class family. Experts abandoned the
notion, put forth by
one popular text, that “the majority of women (happily for
society) are not very much
troubled by sexual feeling of any kind.” In succeeding editions
of his book Plain Home
Talk on Love, Marriage, and Parentage, the physician Edward
Bliss Foote began to favor
a healthy sexuality that gave pleasure to women as well as men.
During the 1890s, the artist Charles Dana Gibson created the
image of the “new
woman.” In his drawings, the Gibson girl was tall, spirited,
athletic, and chastely sexual.
She rejected bustles, hoop skirts, and tightly laced corsets,
preferring natural styles that
did not disguise her female form. In the city, women’s sphere
began to take on a more

public character. Among the new urban institutions that catered
to women, the most
important was the department store, which became a temple for
women’s emerging
role as consumers.
The offspring of the middle class experienced their own
revolution. In the past,
children had been regarded as an economic asset — added hands
for the family farm,
shop, or countinghouse. For the urban middle class, this no
longer held true. Parents
stopped expecting their children to be productive members of
the family. In the old
days, Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked in 1880, “Children had
been repressed and kept
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It � 535
in the background; now they are considered, cosseted, and
pampered.” There was such

a thing as “the juvenile mind,” lectured Jacob Abbott in his
book Gentle Measures in the
Management and Training of the Young (1871). The family was
responsible for provid-
ing a nurturing environment in which the young personality
could grow and mature.
Preparation for adulthood became increasingly linked to formal
education. School
enrollment went up 150 percent between 1870 and 1900. As the
years before adult-
hood began to stretch out, a new stage of life — adolescence —
emerged. While rooted
in longer years of family dependency, adolescence shifted much
of the socializing role
from parents to peer group.
Most affected were the daughters of the mid-
dle class, who, freed from the chores of house-
work, now devoted themselves to self-develop-
ment, including going to high school for many.
The liberating consequences surely went beyond
their parents’ expectations. In a revealing shift in
terminology, “young lady” gave way to “school
girl,” and the daughterly submissiveness of earlier
times gave way to self-expressive independence.
On achieving adulthood, it was not so big a step
for the daughters of the middle class to become
Gibson’s “new women.”
City Life
With its soaring skyscrapers, jostling traffi c, and hum of
business, the city symbolized
energy and enterprise. When the budding writer Hamlin Garland
and his brother arrived
in Chicago from Iowa in 1881, they knew immediately that they

had entered a new world:
“Everything interested us. . . . Nothing was commonplace,
nothing was ugly.” In one
way or another, every city-bound migrant, whether fresh from
the American countryside
or an arrival from a foreign land, experienced something of this
sense of wonder.
The city was utterly unlike the countryside, where every person
had been known
to his or her neighbors. Mark Twain found New York “a
splendid desert, where a
stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race. . . .
Every man rushes, rushes,
rushes, and never has time to be companionable [or] to fool
away on matters which do
not involve dollars and duty and business.”
Migrants could never recreate in the city what they had left
behind. But they found
ways of belonging, they built new institutions, and they learned
how to function in an
impersonal, heterogeneous environment. An urban culture
emerged, and through it,
there developed a new breed of American entirely at home in
the modern city.
Newcomers
The explosive growth of America’s big-city population — a
jump from about six mil-
lion in 1880 to fourteen million in 1900 — meant that cities
were very much a world
of newcomers. Many came from the nation’s countryside; half
of rural families on the
� Why is Ward McAllister so

signifi cant a fi gure in the annals
of the rich?
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so prominent a feature of the
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� In the middle-class family of
this era, how might the wife’s
position have been more
stressful than that of her
husband? Why?
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1877–1914
move in these years were city bound. But it was migrants
marked off by ethnicity who
found city life most daunting. At the turn of the century,
upwards of 30 percent of the
residents of most big cities were foreign-born. The biggest
ethnic group in Boston was

Irish; in Minneapolis, Swedish; in most other northern cities,
German. But by 1910,
southern and eastern Europeans fl ooded in. Poles took the lead
in Chicago; in New
York, it was eastern European Jews; in San Francisco, Italians.
The immigrants had little choice about where they lived; they
needed to fi nd cheap
housing near their jobs. Some gravitated to the outlying factory
districts; others settled
in the congested downtown ghettos. In New York, Italians
crowded into the Irish neigh-
borhoods west of Broadway, while Russian and Polish Jews
pushed the Germans out of
the Lower East Side (Map 18.1). A colony of Hungarians lived
around Houston Street,
and Bohemians occupied the poorer stretches between Fiftieth
and Seventy-sixth
Streets. Every city with a large immigrant population
experienced this kind of ethnic
Mulberry Street, New York City, c. 1900
The infl ux of southern and eastern Europeans created teeming
ghettos in the heart of New York City
and other major American cities. The view is of Mulberry
Street, with its pushcarts, street peddlers,
and bustling traffi c. The inhabitants are mostly Italians, and
some of them, noticing the photographer
preparing his camera, have gathered to be in the picture. Library
of Congress.
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It � 537
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M A P 18.1 The Lower East Side, New York City, 1900
As this map shows, the Jewish immigrants dominating
Manhattan’s Lower East Side preferred living in neigh-
borhoods populated by those from their home regions of eastern
Europe. Their sense of a common identity
made for a remarkable fl owering of educational, cultural, and
social institutions on the Jewish East Side.
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1877–1914
sorting out, as did San Francisco, for example, with its
Chinatown, Italian North Beach,
and Jewish Hayes Valley.
Capitalizing on fellow feeling, immigrant institutions of many
kinds sprang up. In
1911, the 20,000 Poles in Buffalo supported two Polish-
language daily papers. Immigrants
throughout the country avidly read Il Progresso Italo-Americano
and the Yiddish-language
Jewish Daily Forward, both published in New York City.
Companionship could always be
found on street corners, in barbershops and club rooms, and in
saloons. Italians marched
in saint’s day parades, Bohemians gathered in singing societies,
and New York Jews
patronized a lively Yiddish theater. To provide help in times of
sickness and death, the
immigrants organized mutual-aid societies. The Italians of
Chicago had sixty-six of these
organizations in 1903, mostly composed of people from
particular provinces or towns.

Immigrants built a rich and functional institutional life to an
extent unimagined in their
native places (see American Voices, p. 539).
The African American migration from the rural South was just
beginning at the
turn of the century. The black population of New York
increased by 30,000 between
1900 and 1910, making New York second only to Washington,
D.C., as a black urban
center, but the 91,000 African Americans in New York in 1910
represented fewer than
2 percent of the population, and that was also true of Chicago
and Cleveland.
The Cherry Family Tree, 1906
Wiley and Fannie Cherry migrated
in 1893 from North Carolina to
Chicago, settling in the small
African American community
on the West Side. The Cherrys
apparently prospered and by 1906,
when this family portrait was taken,
had entered the black middle
class. When migration intensifi ed
after 1900, longer-settled urban
blacks such as the Cherrys became
uncomfortable with it, and relations
with the needy rural newcomers
were often tense. Courtesy, Lorraine
Hefl in/Chicago Historical Society.
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A M E R I C A N V O I C E S
S O U R C E : Isaac Metzker, ed., A Bintel Brief: Sixty
Years of Letters from the Lower East Side (New York:
Schocken, 1971), 85–86, 110–112.
Deserted Wives, Wayward Husbands A N O N Y M O U S
New York’s leading Yiddish-language paper, the Jewish Daily
Forward, carried a famous
advice page entitled Bintel Brief, which in Yiddish means
“bundle of letters.” None were
more heart-rending than those from abandoned wives, although,
as the second letter shows,
the husbands could be heard from as well. Nearly unknown in
the Old Country, desertion
became such a serious problem among Jewish immigrants that

the Daily Forward ran a
regular feature seeking information about wayward husbands.
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in a digital format.
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arthurjohnson
Rectangle
1877–1914
Urban blacks retreated from the scattered neighborhoods of
older times into
concentrated ghettos — Chicago’s Black Belt on the South
Side, for example, or the
early outlines of New York’s Harlem. Race prejudice cut down
on job opportunities.
Twenty-six percent of Cleveland’s blacks had been skilled

workers in 1870; only 12
percent were skilled by 1890. Entire occupations such as
barbering (except for a black
clientele) became exclusively white. Cleveland’s blacks in 1910
worked mainly as do-
mestics and day laborers, with little hope of moving up the job
ladder.
In the face of pervasive discrimination, urban blacks built their
own communities.
They created a fl ourishing press; fraternal orders; a vast array
of women’s organizations;
and a middle class of doctors, lawyers, and small entrepreneurs.
Above all, there were the
black churches — twenty-fi ve in Chicago in 1905, mainly
Methodist and Baptist. More
than any other institution, remarked one scholar in 1913, it was
the church “which the
Negro may call his own. . . . A new church may be built . . . and
. . . all the ma-
chinery set in motion without ever consulting any white person.
. . . [Religion] more
than anything else represents the real life of the race.” As in the
southern countryside, the
church was the central institution for city blacks, and the
preacher was the most impor-
tant local citizen. Manhattan’s Union Baptist Church, housed
like many others in a store-
front, attracted the “very recent residents of this new, disturbing
city” and, ringing with
spirituals and prayer, made Christianity come “alive Sunday
mornings.”
Ward Politics
Race and ethnicity divided newcomers. Politics, by contrast,
integrated them into the

wider urban society. Migrants to American cities automatically
became ward resi-
dents and acquired a spokesman at city hall. Their alderman got
streets paved, water
mains extended, or permits granted — so that, for example, in
1888, Vito Fortounescere
could “place and keep a stand for the sale of fruit, inside the
stoop-line, in front of the
northeast corner of Twenty-eighth Street and Fourth Avenue” in
Manhattan, or the
parishioners of Saint Maria of Mount Carmel could set off fi
reworks at their Fourth
of July picnic.
These favors came via a system of boss control that, although
present at every
level of party politics, fl ourished most luxuriantly in the big
cities. Political machines
such as Tammany Hall in New York depended on a grassroots
constituency, so they
recruited layers of functionaries — precinct captains, ward
bosses, aldermen — whose
main job was to be accessible and, as best they could, serve the
needs of the party
faithful.
The machine acted as a rough-and-ready social service agency,
providing jobs for
the jobless, a helping hand for a bereaved family, and
intercession with an unfeeling
city bureaucracy. The Tammany ward boss George Washington
Plunkitt had a “regular
system” when fi res broke out in his district. He arranged for
housing for burned-out
families, “fi x[ing] them up till they get things runnin’ again.
It’s philanthropy, but it’s

politics, too — mighty good politics.”
The business community was similarly served. Contractors
sought city business,
gas companies and streetcar lines wanted licenses,
manufacturers needed services and
not-too-nosy inspectors, and the liquor trade and numbers
rackets relied on a tolerant
police force. All of them turned to the machine boss and his
lieutenants.
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It � 541
Of course, the machine exacted a price for these services. The
tenement dweller
gave his vote. The businessman wrote a check. Naturally, some
of the money that
changed hands leaked into the pockets of machine politicians.
This “boodle” could be
blatantly corrupt — kickbacks by contractors; protection money
from gamblers, sa-

loonkeepers, and prostitutes; payoffs from gas and trolley
companies. Boss William
Marcy Tweed made Tammany a byword for corruption until he
was brought down in
1871 by his extravagant graft in the building of a lavish city
courthouse. Thereafter,
machine corruption became less blatant. The turn-of-the-century
Tammanyite George
Plunkitt declared that he had no need for kickbacks and bribes.
He favored what he
called “honest graft,” the easy profi ts that came to savvy
insiders. Plunkitt made most
of his money building wharves on Manhattan’s waterfront. One
way or another, le-
gally or otherwise, machine politics rewarded its supporters.
Plunkitt was an Irishman, and so were most of the politicians
who controlled
Tammany Hall. But by the 1890s, Plunkitt’s Fifteenth District
was fi lling up with Italians
and Russian Jews. In general, the Irish had no love for these
newer immigrants, but
Plunkitt played no favorites. On any given day (as recorded in
his diary), he might attend
an Italian funeral in the afternoon and a Jewish wedding in the
evening, and at each, he
probably paid his respects with a few Italian words or a choice
bit of Yiddish.
In an era when so many forces acted to isolate ghetto
communities, politics served
an integrating function, cutting across ethnic lines and giving
immigrants and blacks
a stake in the larger urban order.
Religion in the City

For urban blacks, as we have seen, the church was a mainstay of
their lives. So it was
for many other city dwellers. But cities were hard on religious
practice. All the great
faiths — Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism — had to
scramble to reconcile reli-
gious belief with the secular urban world.
About 250,000 Jews, mostly of German origin, already
inhabited America when
the eastern European Jews began arriving in the 1880s. Well-
established and prosperous,
the German Jews embraced Reform Judaism, abandoning
religious practices —
from keeping a kosher kitchen to conducting services in Hebrew
— that were “not
adapted to the views and habits of modern civilization.” This
was not the way of the
Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe. Eager to preserve
their traditions, they
founded their own Orthodox synagogues, often in vacant stores,
and practiced Judaism
as they had at home.
Insular though it might be, ghetto life in the American city
could not recreate the
closed village environment on which strict religious observance
depended. “The very
clothes I wore and the very food I ate had a fatal effect on my
religious habits,” con-
fessed the hero of Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David
Levinsky (1917). “If
you . . . attempt to bend your religion to the spirit of your
surroundings, it breaks.
It falls to pieces.” Levinsky shaved off his beard and plunged
into the Manhattan cloth-

ing business. Orthodox Judaism survived this shattering of faith
but only by reducing
its claims on the lives of the faithful.
Catholics faced much the same problem, defi ned as
“Americanism” by the church.
To what degree should congregants adapt to American society?
Should children attend
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parochial or public schools? Should they marry non-Catholics?
Should the education
of clergy be changed? Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul,
Minnesota, felt that “the prin-
ciples of the Church are in harmony with the interests of the
Republic.” But tradition-
alists, led by Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan of New York,
denied the possibility of
such harmony and argued for insulating the church from the
pluralistic American

environment.
Immigrant Catholics, anxious to preserve what they had known
in Europe, gener-
ally supported the church’s conservative wing. But they also
wanted church life to ex-
press their ethnic identities. Newly arrived Catholics wanted
their own parishes, where
they could celebrate their customs, speak their languages, and
establish their own pa-
rochial schools. When they became numerous enough, they also
demanded their own
bishops. The Catholic hierarchy, which was dominated by Irish
Catholics, felt that the
integrity of the church itself was at stake. The demand for
ethnic parishes implied local
control of church property. And if there were bishops for specifi
c ethnic groups, what
would be the effect on the hierarchical structure that unifi ed
the church?
With some strain, the Catholic Church managed to satisfy the
immigrant faithful.
It met the demand for representation by appointing immigrant
priests as auxiliary
bishops within existing dioceses. Ethnic parishes also fl
ourished. By World War I, there
were more than 2,000 foreign-language churches.
For Protestants, the city posed different but not easier
challenges. Every major city
retained great downtown churches where wealthy Protestants
worshipped. Some of
these churches, richly endowed, took pride in nationally
prominent pastors, such as
Henry Ward Beecher of Plymouth Congregational Church in

Brooklyn or Phillips
Brooks of Trinity Episcopal Church in Boston. But the
eminence of these churches,
with their fashionable congregations and imposing edifi ces,
could not disguise the
growing remoteness of traditional Protestantism from its urban
constituency. “Where
is the city in which the Sabbath day is not losing ground?”
lamented a minister in 1887.
The families of businessmen, lawyers, and doctors could be
seen in any church on
Sunday morning, he noted, “but the workingmen and their
families are not there.”
The Protestant churches responded by evangelizing among the
unchurched and
the indifferent. They also began providing reading rooms, day
nurseries, clubhouses,
vocational classes, and other services. The Salvation Army,
which arrived from Great
Britain in 1879, spread the gospel of repentance among the
urban poor, offering an
assistance program that ranged from soup kitchens to shelters
for former prostitutes.
When all else failed, the down-and-outers of American cities
knew they could count
on the Salvation Army.
For single people, there were the Young Men’s and Women’s
Christian Associa-
tions, which had arrived from Britain before the Civil War.
Housing for single women
was an especially important mission of the YWCAs. The
gymnasiums that made the
YMCAs synonymous with “muscular Christianity” were equally
important for young

men. No other organization so effectively combined activities
for young people with
an evangelizing appeal through Bible classes,
nondenominational worship, and a reli-
gious atmosphere.
The social meaning that people sought in religion accounts for
the enormous
popularity of a book called In His Steps (1896). The author, a
Congregational minister
named Charles M. Sheldon, told the story of a congregation that
resolved to live by
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Christ’s precepts for one year. “If the church members were all
doing as Jesus would
do,” Sheldon asked, “could it remain true that armies of men
would walk the streets for
jobs, and hundreds of them curse the church, and thousands of
them fi nd in the sa-

loon their best friend?”
The most potent form of urban evangelism — revivalism — said
little about social
uplift. From their eighteenth-century origins, revival
movements had steadfastly fo-
cused on individual redemption. Earthly problems, revivalists
believed, would be
solved by converting to Christ. Beginning in the mid-1870s,
revival meetings swept
through the cities.
The pioneering fi gure was Dwight L. Moody, a former Chicago
shoe salesman and
YMCA offi cial. After preaching in Britain for two years,
Moody returned to America
in 1875 and began staging revival meetings that drew thousands.
He preached an op-
timistic, uncomplicated, nondenominational message. Eternal
life could be had for the
asking, Moody shouted as he held up his Bible. His listeners
needed only “to come
forward and take, take!”
Many other preachers followed in Moody’s path. The most
colorful was Billy
Sunday, a once hard-drinking former outfi elder for the Chicago
White Stockings
baseball team who mended his ways and found religion. Like
Moody and other city
revivalists, Sunday was a farm boy. His ripsnorting attacks on
fashionable ministers
and the “booze traffi c” carried the ring of rustic America. By
realizing that many
people remained villagers at heart, revivalists found a key for
bringing city dwellers

back to the church.
City Amusements
City people compartmentalized life’s activities, setting the
workplace apart from home
and working time apart from free time. “Going out” became a
necessity, demanded
not only as solace for a hard day’s work but also as proof that
life was better in the New
World than in the Old. “He who can enjoy and does not enjoy
commits a sin,” a
Yiddish-language paper told its readers. And enjoyment now
meant buying a ticket
and being entertained (see Voices from Abroad, p. 544).
Music halls attracted huge audiences. Chicago had six
vaudeville houses in 1896,
twenty-two in 1910. Evolving from tawdry variety and minstrel
shows, vaudeville
cleaned up its routines, making them suitable for the entire
family, and turned into
professional entertainment handled by national booking
agencies. With its standard
program of nine musical, dancing, and comedy acts, vaudeville
attained enormous
popularity just as the movies arrived. The fi rst primitive fi lms,
a minute or so of hu-
mor or glimpses of famous people, appeared in 1896 in penny
arcades and as fi ller in
vaudeville shows. Within a decade, millions of city people were
watching fi lms of in-
creasing length and artistry at nickelodeons (named after the fi
ve-cent admission
charge) across the country.
For young unmarried workers, the cheap amusements of the city

created a new
social space. “I want a good time,” a New York clothing
operator told an investigator.
“And there is no . . . way a girl can get it on $8 a week. I guess
if anyone wants to take
me to a dance he won’t have to ask me twice” — hence the
widespread ritual among the
urban working class of “treating.” The girls spent what money
they had dressing up;
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From all parts of the United States, legions
of intrepid ladies and Sunday-best farmers
arrive to admire the splendid sights, the
unexampled wealth, the dizzying variety, the
herculean surge, the striking appearance of
Coney Island, the now famous island, four
years ago an abandoned sand bank, that
today is a spacious amusement area
providing relaxation and recreation for
hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers
who throng to its pleasant beaches every
day. . . .

Other nations — ourselves among
them — live devoured by a sublime demon
within that drives us to the tireless pursuit
of an ideal of love or glory. . . . Not so
with these tranquil souls, stimulated only by
a desire for gain. One scans those shimmer-
ing beaches . . . one views the throngs
seated in comfortable chairs along the
seashore, fi lling their lungs with the fresh,
invigorating air. But it is said that those
from our lands who remain here long are
overcome with melancholy . . . because
this great nation is void of spirit.
But what coming and going! What
torrents of money! What facilities for every
pleasure! What absolute absence of any
outward sadness or poverty! Everything in
the open air: the animated groups, the
immense dining rooms, the peculiar
courtship of North Americans, which is
virtually devoid of the elements that
compose the shy, tender, elevated love in
our lands, the theatre, the photographers’
booth, the bathhouses! Some weigh
themselves, for North Americans are greatly
elated, or really concerned, if they fi nd they
have gained or lost a pound. . . .
This spending, this uproar, these
crowds, the activity of this amazing ant hill
never slackens from June to October, from
morning ’til night. . . . Then, like a
monster that vomits its contents into the

hungry maw of another monster, that
colossal crowd, that straining, crushing
mass, forces its way onto the trains, which
speed across wastes, groaning under their
burden, until they surrender it to the
tremendous steamers, enlivened by the
sound of harps and violins, convey it to the
piers, and debouch the weary merrymakers
into the thousand trolleys that pursue the
thousand tracks that spread through
slumbering New York like veins of steel.
S O U R C E : Juan de Onís, trans., The America of
José Martí: Selected Writings (New York: Noonday
Press, 1954), 103–110.
Coney Island, 1881 J O S É M A R T ĺ
José Martí, a Cuban patriot and revolutionary (see p. 616), was
a journalist by profession. In
exile from 1880 to 1895, he spent most of his time in New York
City, reporting to his Latin
American readers on the customs of the Yankees. Martí took
special — one might say
perverse — pleasure in observing Americans at play.
V O I C E S F R O M A B R O A D
their boyfriends paid for the fun. Parental control over courtship
broke down, and
amid the bright lights and lively music of the dance hall and
amusement park, working-
class youths forged a more easygoing culture of pleasure-
seeking.

The geography of the big city carved out ample space for
commercialized sex.
Prostitution was not new to urban life, but in the late nineteenth
century, it became
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It � 545
more open and more intermingled with other forms of public
entertainment. Opium
and cocaine were widely available and not yet illegal. In New
York, the red-light district
was the Tenderloin, running northward from Twenty-third Street
between Fifth and
Eighth Avenues.
The Tenderloin and the Bowery, farther downtown, were also
the sites of a robust
gay subculture. The long-held notion that homosexual life was
covert, in the closet, in
late-nineteenth-century America appears not to be true, at least

not in the country’s
premier city. In certain corners of the city, a gay world fl
ourished, with a full array of
saloons, meeting places, and drag balls, which were widely
known and patronized by
uptown “slummers.”
Of all forms of (mostly) male diversion, none was more specifi
c to the city, or so
spectacularly successful, as professional baseball. The game’s
promoters decreed that
baseball had been created in 1839 by Abner Doubleday in the
village of Cooperstown,
New York. Actually, baseball was neither of American origin —
stick-and-ball games go
far back into the Middle Ages — nor particularly a product of
rural life. Under a variety
of names, team sports resembling baseball proliferated in early-
nineteenth-century
America. In an effort to regularize the game, the New Yorker
Alexander Cartwright
codifi ed the rules in 1845, only to see his Knickerbockers
defeated the next year at
The Bowery at Night, 1895
The Bowery (a name dating back to the original Dutch
settlement) was a major thoroughfare in
downtown Manhattan. This painting by W. Louis Sonntag, Jr.
shows the street in all its glory, crowded
with shoppers and pleasure seekers. It was during this time that
the Bowery gained its raffi sh reputation.
Museum of the City of New York.

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1877–1914
Hoboken by the New York Baseball Club in what is regarded as
the fi rst modern base-
ball game. Over the next twenty years, baseball clubs appeared
across the country, and
intercity competition developed on a scheduled basis. In 1868,
the sport became openly
professional, following the lead of the Cincinnati Red Stockings
in signing players to
contracts for the season.
Big-time baseball came into its own with the launching of the
National League
in 1876. The team owners were profit-minded businessmen who
shaped the sport
to please the fans. Wooden grandstands gave way to the
concrete and steel stadi-
ums of the early twentieth century, such as Fenway Park in
Boston, Forbes Field in
Pittsburgh, and Shibe Park in Philadelphia. For the urban
multitudes, baseball
grew into something more than an afternoon at the ballpark. By

rooting for the
home team, fans found a way of identifying with their city.
Amid the diversity and
anonymity of urban life, the common experience and language
of baseball acted
as a bridge among strangers.
Most effi cient at this task, however, was the newspaper. James
Gordon Bennett,
founder of the New York Herald in 1835, wanted “to record the
facts . . . for the great
masses of the community.” The news was whatever interested
city readers, starting
with crime, scandal, and sensational events. After the Civil
War, the New York Sun
added the human-interest story, which made news of ordinary
happenings. Newspa-
pers also targeted specifi c audiences. A women’s page offered
recipes and fashion news,
separate sections covered sports and high society, and the
Sunday supplement helped
fi ll the weekend hours. In the competition for readers, the
champion newsman was
Joseph Pulitzer, the owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and,
after 1883, the New York
World (Table 18.2).
Pulitzer was in turn challenged by William Randolph Hearst.
Hearst was an unlikely
press magnate, the pampered son of a California silver king
who, while at Harvard (on the
way to being expelled), got interested in Pulitzer’s newspaper
game. He took over his fa-
ther’s dull San Francisco Examiner and rebuilt it into a highly
profi table, sensationalist
paper. For example, were any grizzly bears left in California?

Hearst dispatched a news-
man to the Tehachapi Mountains, where, after three months of
arduous trapping, he
caught a grizzly. The Examiner reported all this in exhaustive
detail, ending triumphantly
with the carnival display of the unfortunate beast. There was
much more of the same:
rescues, murders, scandals, sob stories, anything that might
arouse in readers what an
editor called “the gee-whiz emotion.” Hearst’s brand of
sensationalism was dubbed
yellow journalism, after The Yellow Kid (1895), the fi rst comic
strip to appear in color.
TABLE 18.2 Newspaper Circulation
Year Total Circulation
1870 2,602,000
1880 3,566,000
1890 8,387,000
1900 15,102,000
1909 24,212,000
SOURCE: Historical Statistics of the United States, 2 vols.
(Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975), 2: 810.
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It � 547
“He who is without a newspaper,” said the great showman P. T.
Barnum, “is cut off
from his species.” Barnum was speaking of city people and their
hunger for informa-
tion. Hearst understood this. That’s why he made barrels of
money.
The Higher Culture
In the midst of this popular ferment, new institutions of higher
culture were taking
shape in America’s cities. A desire for the cultivated life was
not, of course, specifi cally
urban. Before the Civil War, the lyceum movement had sent
lecturers to the remotest
towns, bearing messages of culture and learning. Chautauqua,
founded in upstate
New York in 1874, carried on this work of cultural
dissemination. However, great
museums, public libraries, opera companies, and symphony
orchestras could fl ourish
only in metropolitan centers.
The nation’s fi rst major art museum, the Corcoran Gallery of
Art, opened in
Washington, D.C., in 1869. New York’s Metropolitan Museum
of Art started in rented
quarters two years later, then moved in 1880 to its permanent
site in Central Park

and launched an ambitious program of art acquisition. When fi
nancier J. Pierpont
Morgan became chairman of the board in 1905, the
Metropolitan’s preeminence
was assured. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts was founded in
1876 and Chicago’s
Art Institute in 1879.
Symphony orchestras also appeared, fi rst in New York under
the conductors
Theodore Thomas and Leopold Damrosch in the 1870s and then
in Boston and
Chicago during the next decade. National tours by these leading
orchestras planted
the seeds for orchestral societies in many other cities. Public
libraries grew from
modest collections (in 1870, only seven had as many as 50,000
books) into major
urban institutions. The greatest library benefactor was Andrew
Carnegie, who
announced in 1881 that he would build a library in any town or
city that was prepared
to maintain it. By 1907, Carnegie had spent more than $32.7
million to establish
about 1,000 libraries throughout the country.
The late nineteenth century was the great age not only of money
making, but also
of money giving. Generous with their surplus wealth, new
millionaires patronized the
arts partly as a civic duty, partly to promote themselves
socially, but also out of a sense
of national pride.
“In America there is no culture,” pronounced the English critic
G. Lowes Dickinson

in 1909. Science and the practical arts, yes — “every possible
application of life to pur-
poses and ends” — but “no life for life’s sake.” Such
condescending remarks received a
respectful American hearing out of a sense of cultural
inferiority to the Old World. In
1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published a
novel, The Gilded Age, that
satirized America as a land of money-grubbers and speculators.
This enormously popu-
lar book touched a nerve in the American psyche. Its title has
since been appropriated by
historians to characterize the late nineteenth century —
America’s “Gilded Age” — as an
era of materialism and cultural shallowness.
Some members of the upper class, such as the novelist Henry
James, moved to
Europe. But the more common response was to try to raise the
nation’s cultural level.
The newly rich had a hard time of it. They did not have much
opportunity to culti-
vate a taste for art, but they were quick learners. George W.
Vanderbilt, grandson of
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1877–1914
the rough-hewn Cornelius Vanderbilt, championed French
Impressionism, and the
coal and steel baron Henry Clay Frick built a brilliant art
collection that is still housed
as a public museum in his mansion in New York City. The
enthusiasm of moneyed
Americans largely fueled the great cultural institutions that
sprang up during the
Gilded Age.
A deeply conservative idea of culture sustained this generous
patronage. The aim
was to embellish life, not to probe or reveal its meaning. “Art,”
says the hero of the
Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s sentimental novel Norwood
(1867), “attempts to work
out its end solely by the use of the beautiful, and the artist is to
select out only such
things as are beautiful.” The idea of culture also took on an
elitist cast: Shakespeare,
once a staple of popular entertainment (in various bowdlerized
versions), was appro-
priated into the domain of “serious” theater. Simultaneously,
the world of culture be-
came feminized. “Husbands or sons rarely share those
interests,” noted one observer.
In American life, remarked the clergyman Horace Bushnell, men
represented the
“force principle,” women the “beauty principle.”

The depiction of life, the eminent editor and novelist William
Dean Howells
wrote, “must be tinged with suffi cient idealism to make it all of
a truly uplifting
character. . . . The fi ner side of things — the idealistic — is the
answer for us.” The
“genteel tradition,” as this literary school came to be known,
dominated the nation’s
purveyors of elite culture — its journals, publishers, and
college professors — from the
1860s onward.
But the urban world could not fi nally be kept at bay. Howells
himself resigned in
1881 from the Atlantic Monthly, a stronghold of the genteel
tradition, and called for a
literature that sought “to picture the daily life in
the most exact terms possible.” In a series of realis-
tic novels — A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of
Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard of New For-
tunes (1890) — Howells captured the urban mid-
dle class. Stephen Crane’s Maggie: Girl of the Streets
(1893), privately printed because no publisher
would touch it, unfl inchingly described the de-
struction of a slum girl.
The city had entered the American imagination
and become, by the early 1900s, a main theme of
American art and literature. And because it chal-
lenged so many assumptions of an older, republican
America, the city also became an overriding concern
of reformers and, after the turn of the century, the
main theater in the drama of the Progressive era.
S U M M A R Y

In this chapter, we explored the emergence of a distinctively
urban American society.
The chapter was concerned, fi rst of all, with how the great
nineteenth-century cities
came to be built. Urban growth was driven by industrialization
— by the geographic
� In both politics and religion,
established institutions had to
fi nd ways of incorporating a fl ood
of newcomers to the city. But the
politicians seemed to have an
easier time of it. Why?
� American cities housed a great
many people struggling to get
by. Yet they always seemed ready
to dig into their pockets for a
newspaper or a ticket to the ball
game. Why?
� Why do we date the arrival of
institutions of higher culture with
the rise of the industrial city?
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It � 549
concentration of industries, by the increasing scale of
production, and by industry’s
need for city-based fi nancial and administrative services. A
burst of innovation brought
forth mass transit, skyscrapers, electricity, and much else that
made the big city livable.
Although not constrained constitutionally, the public sector left
city building as much
as possible to private initiative and private capital. The result
was dramatic growth,
with an infrastructure superior to Europe’s, but at the price of a
degraded environ-
ment and squalid living conditions for the poor.
The second concern of this chapter was with an urban class
structure defi ned
most visibly by geography. The poor inhabited the inner cities
and factory districts,
the middle class spread out into the suburbs, and the rich lived
insulated in fancy
neighborhoods or beyond the suburbs. For the wealthy, an elite
society emerged, with
an opulent lifestyle and exclusive social organizations. The
middle class withdrew into
the private world of the family. Intersecting with family were
issues of gender identity,
with white-collar husbands embracing a cult of masculinity and
wives emboldened by
the liberating prospects of the “new woman.”

Finally, this chapter described the components of a distinctive
urban culture. City
life was strongly fl avored by the ways in which newcomers —
European immigrants,
southern blacks, small-town whites — adapted to an alien urban
environment. In poli-
tics and religion, we saw most vividly how American
institutions adapted to the new-
comers. City life was also distinguished by an explosion of
leisure activities, ranging
from vaudeville to the yellow press and, at a more elevated
level, by the institutions of
art, music, and literature that sustain a nation’s higher culture.
Connections: Society
Cities always played a disproportionate part in the nation’s
economic, political, and
cultural life. But only in the late nineteenth century, as the
United States became an
industrial power, did the rural/urban balance shift and the cities
develop a distinctly
urban culture. The consequences of that development loom large
in the battle for
reform during the Progressive era (Chapter 20) and in the
cultural confl ict in the
1920s (Chapter 23). In succeeding decades, we can still
distinguish what is distinctively
urban in American development, but in truth, urban history and
American history in-
creasingly merge as the United States becomes in our own time
a nation of urban and
suburban dwellers, with farmers the merest fraction of
America’s population.

F O R F U R T H E R E X P L O R AT I O N
The starting points for modern urban historiography are Sam
Bass Warner’s pioneer-
ing book on Boston, Streetcar Suburbs, 1870 –1900 (1962), and
a subsequent work, The
Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods (1968), that shows
how private decision
making shaped the American city. Innovations in urban
construction are treated in
Carl Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913
(1996), and Harold L. Platt,
The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area,
1880 –1930 (1991). As-
pects of middle-class life are revealed in Howard B. Chudacoff,
The Age of the Bach-
elor (1999); Jane Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The
Victorian Origins of
American Girlhood (2003); Michael Ebner, Chicago’s North
Shore: A Suburban His-
tory (1988); and John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility:
Manners in Nineteenth-Century
America (1990). On urban life, see especially Gunther Barth,
City People: The Rise of
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1877–1914
Modern City Culture (1982); David Block, Baseball Before We
Knew It (2004); John F.
Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the
Century (1978); and Kathy
Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in
Turn-of-the-Century New York
(1986). The best introduction to Gilded Age intellectual
currents is Alan Trachtenberg,
The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society, 1865–1893
(1983). On the Columbian
Exposition of 1893, an excellent Web site is “The World’s
Columbian Exposition: Idea,
Experience, Aftermath” at
xroads.virginia.edu/~ma96/WCE/title.html, including detailed
guides to every site at the fair and analysis of its lasting impact.
T E S T Y O U R K N O W L E D G E
To assess your mastery of the material in this chapter and for
Web sites, images, and
documents related to this chapter, visit
bedfordstmartins.com/henrettaconcise.
1869 � Corcoran Gallery of Art, nation’s
fi rst major art museum, opens in
Washington, D.C.
1871 � Chicago fi re
1873 � Mark Twain and Charles Dudley

Warner publish The Gilded Age
1875 � Dwight L. Moody launches urban
revivalist movement
1876 � Alexander Graham Bell patents
telephone
� National Baseball League founded
1879 � Thomas Edison creates practical
incandescent light bulb
� Salvation Army, originally formed
in Britain, is established in the
United States
1881 � Andrew Carnegie off ers to build a
library for every American city
1883 � New York City’s Metropolitan
Opera founded
� Joseph Pulitzer purchases New
York World
1885 � William Jenney builds fi rst
steel-framed structure, Chicago’s
Home Insurance Building
1887 � First electric trolley line
constructed in Richmond, Virginia
1893 � Chicago World’s Fair
� “City Beautiful” movement
1895 � William Randolph Hearst enters

New York journalism
1897 � Boston builds fi rst American
subway
1900 � Theodore Dreiser publishes
Sister Carrie
1901 � New York Tenement House Law
1904 � New York subway system opens
1906 � San Francisco earthquake
1913 � Fifty-fi ve-story Woolworth
Building opens in New York City
T I M E L I N E
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